Subject: Re: [lojban] Translating into lojban

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2000 04:53:11 -0400

At 01:10 AM 06/13/2000 +0000, [email-masked] wrote:
>How can sentences of the form, (1) "To love evil is as confused as to
>hate good" and (2) "Squares, by definition, have four sides", be
>accurately translated into lojban?

I could translate these, but I am trying to figure out what in particular 
about their form you are asking about.

Better than that, let us look at putting them into a form of English so 
that you can see some underlying predicate structure that would allow you 
to put them into Lojban. That is the real job in translation, and it 
separates the problem of understanding the English (which I think is the 
challenge in these sentences) from the rather different challenge of 
learning the right Lojban grammar tools to translate a given grammatical 
structure (fairly easy).

The second sentence is easy, or hard, as you prefer. It says "Squares have 
four sides." There is, inserted into this simple sentence, the 
metalinguistic comment "by definition". You need to answer the question 
"by whose definition" to continue. This takes more context than you have 
provided. If you are imposing this definition yourself, (not likely in the 
case of squares) Lojban has a evidential of definition (ca'e). Otherwise, 
you are using someone else's definition, which could be stated using ca'e 
or stated as a postulate (ru'a). In either case, you have a simple 
sentence, modified slightly to indicate why you are saying it.

The first sentence is quite unlike the second one, which is why I ask what 
commonality of form you are seeing that causes you to ask how to translate 
"sentences of the form ...". In the English, we have a phrase "To love 
evil" with no subject, and another "To hate good" - these suggest the 
Latinate infinitive by the use of "to" but that is only because English has 
no way to grammatically move between metalinguistic levels in a single 
sentence as Lojban can. (Latin's infinitive morphology allows for two 
metalinguistic levels in one sentence).

Then each of these two "infinitive phrases" are connected by the main verb 
(read "predicate" for Lojban "is as confused as" which could be more 
clearly stated as "to be equally confusing" with appropriate arguments 
labelled.

In Lojban each of the "infinitive phrases" would be an abstraction bridi 
stuck into its own sumti, and the two sumti would then be related by the 
main bridi as I have restated it.

Having outlined the solution, I will let you ask questions or try it 
yourself rather than actually look up all the words and page numbers in the 
book for you. And this will allow you to clarify for us what the issue is 
that you are trying to understand.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org